Technological Icons for an Affluent Age

2011_3-17 Technological Icons for an Affluent age

If the sun and moon would doubt/they would immediately go out. (Wm. Blake)

You impress me as a hardcore skeptic and it has shaped your view of teaching. You seemed to fret a lot about the no-talent kids you had in class, and even feel some guilt about how you handled them. From Day One I accepted them; they came with the territory, so I turned my attention to those kids I could reach. In some ways maybe it wasn’t fair, but it simplified my job, and I had only so much energy to give and I didn’t see any virtue in wasting it on the whole class.

Frankly, I am amazed you lasted so long in Academe. With your technical skill, intelligence and general all-around know-how you could have done many things and made more money, although it sounds like you did well with what you made. Like you I was skeptical about the whole enterprise of Higher Education but I felt I should at least give teaching a whirl to see what I could do. Spratt was my vehicle for opening that possibility for me. By the time I got to UNLV could see that Higher Education was tied to the Federal Government, the Military-Industrial complex, and Corporation Land. (The first Chancellor of UNLV was from the world of Advertising. When I handed him the AFT Charter in 1968 he said to me, “ Does this mean you are going to bring your union goons here?”) After AE had run its course artists took on a new identity: the businessman artist. There was no longer the isolated genius creating in a hovel; all romantic conception faded away. These new artists were producing “necktie art” and art drained of personality. Artists were, as I recall, after “objecthood.” My best student in Vegas, after two years in the Masters program at Berkeley, saw some of my transitional drawing in 1971 and called my work “self indulgent,” a mortal sin in his book. At the same time Spratt had been telling me that artist were bound to be working hand and glove with industrial craftsmen in the creating of “technological icons for an Affluent Age.” Due to my working class background, I had always felt like a “Stranger in Paradise” in Academe. It was hard for me to feel at home and comfortable in Academe, and teaching had taught me that. I was good in the classroom but not with the institutional bullshit. And clearly, the drift of the Art World was in a direction not compatible with my inclinations and preoccupations. So I decided it was time to check out. And I did.


I had gone to UNLV as a 29-year old naïve idealist and at 35, after a few short years of intense living and activity I left exhausted, psychically played out, and despairing over the artistic, political and social conditions in America. During the last couple of years at UNLV I taught as a subversive, someone who wanted to undermine the whole enterprise as corrupt and joined at the hip with a Political Establishment that was run by money and power. It was as if I had revolted against my patrons, Spratt, Tansey, Bowman, the lot, who had duped me, I felt, had me believing university teaching was an honorable profession full of sterling personalities. After 5 years I saw it quite differently. I could write a book to list all the negative incidents of those 5 years. Sometimes I think I was lucky to get out alive. I had paintings slashed, drawings defaced, and unhappy mothers buying guns to come after me for corrupting their darling boys.

Three times in my life I have taken a leap in the dark with no idea where I might land. The first was leaving Madison on a whim in 1957 when I had only one year to go to graduate, and I ended up in the Bay Area in California, and you know what happened after that. The second leap of faith was leaving UNLV and teaching behind when I had zero possibilities ahead of me. That turned out pretty good too. The third time was leaving my job at the church at the age of 59. I can’t tell you how many people told me I was crazy, leaving a sure thing for something iffy. That leap turned out very well—a good job with great people in a welcoming subculture that led to 5 years of online writing. It’s faith baby, faith. Each time I came out smelling like a rose.

Obviously, with your more middle class background, you didn’t feel that discomfort that bugged me. You were better at rolling with the punches. You got along for, what, 40 years. Fairly early on you got married and settled in for 18 years, secure in your job and, I suspect, oblivious of the institutional bullshit. You were more career orientated from the get-go. You told your self you could keep the bullshit at arm’s length and apparently you managed that for years. In all the emails you’ve sent me I don’t recall any serious complaints about colleagues, intermural politics, or boredom. You stayed on even keel and above the fray. God, I wish I had been talented in that way. But I am a different type of personality, more volatile and impulsive, more willing to take chances. And, I dare say, much more emotional. I remember you as congenial but always at an emotional distance, with a tendency to be aloof and as such, a bit untouchable. It kept you immune from a lot of tussles that are wearing, from things that easily got under my skin. I was a hot button where you were, are, a cool customer, now, then and forever. Don’t you see yourself that way? But you are a bit manic about your intellectual propensities, very grounded in empiricism and science, always trawling for bright nuggets of insight and wisdom that you can hang your hat on for a few weeks until something else attracts your interest. I can understand the need to build oneself a picture or a system that helps us keep our heads above water, which holds off doubt, obscurity and the enormity of the indecipherable universe. We each have carved a mask and a niche to survive in until it’s time “to grab the Tiger by the tail.”